Genre In Language Discourse And Cognition

The study of genre is scattered across research disciplines. This volume offers an integrative perspective starting from the assumption that genres are cognitive constructs, recognized, maintained and employed by members of a given discourse community. Its central questions are: What does genre knowledge consist of? How is it organized in cognition? How is it applied in discourse production and interpretation? How is it reflected in language use?

The study of genre is scattered across research disciplines. This volume offers an integrative perspective starting from the assumption that genres are cognitive constructs, recognized, maintained and employed by members of a given discourse community. Its central questions are: What does genre knowledge consist of? How is it organized in cognition? How is it applied in discourse production and interpretation? How is it reflected in language use?

Although genre studies abound in literary criticism, researchers and scholars interested in the social contexts of literacy have recently become interested in the dynamic, rhetorical dimensions of speech genres. Within this burgeoning scholarly community, the authors are among the first researchers working within social science traditions to study genre from the perspective of the implicit knowledge of language users. Thus, this is the first sociocognitive study of genre using case-study, naturalistic research methods combined with the techniques of rhetorical and discourse analysis. The term "genre knowledge" refers to an individual's repertoire of situationally appropriate responses to recurrent situations -- from immediate encounters to distanced communication through the medium of print, and more recently, the electronic media. One way to study the textual character of disciplinary knowledge is to examine both the situated actions of writers, and the communicative systems in which disciplinary actors participate. These two perspectives are presented in this book. The authors' studies of disciplinary communication examine operations of systems as diverse as peer review in scientific publications and language in a first grade science classroom. The methods used include case study and ethnographic techniques, rhetorical and discourse analysis of changing features within large corpora and in the texts of individual writers. Through the use of these techniques, the authors engaged in both micro-level and macro-level analyses and developed a perspective which reflects both foci. From this perspective they propose that what micro-level studies of actors' situated actions frequently depict as individual processes, can also be interpreted -- from the macro-level -- as communicative acts within a discursive network or system. The research methods and the theoretical framework presented are designed to raise provocative questions for scholars, researchers, and teachers in a number of fields: linguists who teach and conduct research in ESP and LSP and are interested in methods for studying professional communication; scholars in the fields of communication, rhetoric, and sociology of science with an interest in the textual dynamics of scientific and scholarly communities; educational researchers interested in cognition in context; and composition scholars interested in writing in the disciplines.

This text offers a new way forward for highlighting language manipulation on behalf of lay-readers as well as for enhancing the interpretative authority of the analyst. It accomplishes this through the innovation of a model of lay-reader processing. The model is an original synthesis of elements from four contemporary cognitive frameworks - connectionism, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistic evidence on inference generation, relevance theory.

The volume explores key convergences between cognitive and discourse approaches to language and language learning, both first and second. The emphasis is on the role of language as it is used in everyday interaction and as it reflects everyday cognition. The contributors share a usage-based perspective on language - whether they are examining grammar or metaphor or interactional dynamics - which situates language as part of a broader range of systems which underlie the organization of social life and human thought. While sharing fundamental assumptions about language, the particulars of the areas of inquiry and emphases of those engaged in discourse analysis versus cognitive linguistics are diverse enough that, historically, many have tended to remain unaware of the interrelations among these approaches. Thus, researchers have also largely overlooked the possibilities of how work from each perspective can challenge, inform, and enrich the other. The papers in the volume make a unique contribution by more consciously searching for connections between the two broad approaches. The results are a set of dynamic, thought-provoking analyses that add considerably to our understanding of language and language learning. The papers represent a rich range of frameworks within a usage-based approach to language. Cognitive Grammar, Mental Space and Blending Theory, Construction Grammar, ethnomethodology, and interactional sociolinguistics are just some of the frameworks used by the researchers in this volume. The particular subjects of inquiry are also quite varied and include first and second language learning, signed language, syntactic phenomena, interactional regulation and dynamics, discourse markers, metaphor theory, polysemy, language processing and humor. The volume is of interests to researchers in cognitive linguistics, discourse and conversational analysis, and first and second language learning, as well as signed languages.

A pioneering text in its first edition, this revised publication of Cognitive Poetics offers a rigorous and principled approach to literary reading and analysis. The second edition of this seminal text features: • updated theory, frameworks, and examples throughout, including new explanations of literary meaning, the power of reading, literary force, and emotion; • extended examples of literary texts from Old English to contemporary literature, covering genres including religious, realist, romantic, science fictional, and surrealist texts, and encompassing poetry, prose, and drama; • new chapters on the mind-modelling of character, the building of text-worlds, the feeling of immersion and ambience, and the resonant power of emotion in literature; • fully updated and accessible accounts of Cognitive Grammar, deictic shifts, prototypicality, conceptual framing, and metaphor in literary reading. Encouraging the reader to adopt a fresh approach to understanding literature and literary analyses, each chapter introduces a different framework within cognitive poetics and relates it to a literary text. Accessibly written and reader-focused, the book invites further explorations either individually or within a classroom setting. This thoroughly revised edition of Cognitive Poetics includes an expanded further reading section and updated explorations and discussion points, making it essential reading for students on literary theory and stylistics courses, as well as a fundamental tool for those studying critical theory, linguistics, and literary studies.

This book brings to light how the genealogies in the Bible are a developing genre, flexible in both patterns and deviations, allowing the inclusion of otherwise absent family members like mothers and daughters.

Genre, Relevance and Global Coherence seeks to explain how discourse types or genre may influence the addressee's inferential processes in identifying the communicator's intention. There are two main areas where such an influence is often felt: the interpretation of tense and aspect markers is often said to differ in various text types, and the communication of implicatures is said to differ in various talk-exchange types. The first type of genre effects is usually approached by global coherence-based accounts whereas the second by proposals based on Gricean pragmatics. This study examines both types of accounts, arguing that the key to a solution lies in the interplay of the cognitive and communicative principles of relevance proposed by Sperber and Wilson. It unravels intricate relations between cognitive mechanisms, communicative principles and expectations of relevance in complex ostensive stimuli such as texts.